AI expert explains why he is 'very close to certainty' that we are currently living in a simulation

Existence as we know it is almost certainly a simulated design, according to a renowned Latvian computer scientist and AI maestro.

Founder of Cyber Security Lab at the University of Louisville, Dr Roman Yampolskiy joined podcaster and entrepreneur Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO last week.

During their brain-bruising discussion, which ran close to 90 minutes in length, the podcast guest came to the table with several revelations, including his belief that humankind is already so entrenched in technological lives that we're essentially living in a simulation.

That's child's play (literally) in his mind, though. The deeper suggestion is all to do with a species of future humans who've conquered technology, playing with their toys.

A computer scientist is pretty convinced our reality is an experiment (Getty Stock Images)

Yampolskiy was responding to Bartlett's reference to Google's Genie 3, which allows users to generate a whole world from just one picture.

"You can move through the world or put it on a screen for people to see," explained the podcaster. "Google have released this technology that allows you with a simple prompt to make a three-dimensional world that you can then navigate through, and in that world it has memory, so if you paint on a wall and turn away, you look back and [it's persistent]. When I look at that I go, 'Bloody hell, this is like the foothills of being able to create a simulation that's indistinguishable from everything I see here.'"

Smiling, the bearded AI expert chipped in with: "Right. That's why I think we are in [a simulation], that's exactly the reason. AI is getting to the level of creating human agents, human revelations, and virtual reality is getting to the level of being indistinguishable from ours."

Bartlett, who famously went from scavenging pizzas as a university dropout to earning £10,000 an hour, went on to question Yampolskiy about the "first principles" of his theory.

"We're definitely running a lot of simulations for research, for entertainment, games, all sorts of reasons, and the number of those greatly exceeds the number of real worlds we're in. Look at all the video games kids are playing, every kid plays 10 different games. A billion kids in the world, so there is 10 billion simulations and one real world," he said.

"Even more so, when we think about advanced AI super-intelligent systems, their thinking is not like ours, they think in a lot more detail, they run experiments. So running a detailed simulation of some problem at a level of creating artificial humans and simulating the whole planet would be something they do routinely. It's the future simulation thinking about something in this world."

Anyone else's head aching right now?